Will Gatti & Daniel Finn

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That was Solstice and this is Dyllis

Dyllis was a witch. That was a fact. A proper fact, and witches were supposed to be wicked. ‘Right wicked,’ she muttered to herself while she was doing her washing up in her caravan. ‘From toe to tip.’ She used the back of her wrist to wipe a soap-sud off her nose.

She hadn’t ever felt like being wicked, not really, really wicked, which is why she didn’t do much witching and anyway there was no need. But here is the thing, if you don’t do any witching, you lose the art. It’s as if the magic goes off, gets rusty. Use it or lose it. That was what Terence Thomas had on the post office door, and now the little post office was gone and Mr Thomas and his bad tempered wife had moved away. Dylis had no intention of moving away.

But if you’re a witch, people should know you’re a witch, and children should certainly be a bit frightened of you. That’s only reasonable. On the whole, though, Dylis didn’t have much time for children. She hadn’t much liked being a child herself; all that running around, and skipping, and getting into a tangle of shouty arguments and everyone being horrible on the internet (though she was a bit shaky on things to do with smarty-pant phones, not having a computer or knowing diddly squat about Facebookies, Snapple-chat or Instagranny or any of those oddly bits of whiskery nonsense).

‘So,’ she said to herself and wiped the steam off the window behind the sink. It was getting dark outside and she could see her frowning reflection in the window, and behind that she could see Wyck wood, and the last rooks flying in. ‘So, I better do some wickeding tomorrow. I’ll see what grabs me. Nothing fancy.’

‘No, nothing too bad,’ she murmured a little bit later on when she was in bed and pulling her duvet up to her chin. ‘Just something. Maybe I’ll give Mr Biggins a stir.’ She smiled. She didn’t like Biggins the butcher. Not many people did.